I'll be presenting a talk at Drupal Melbourne on Tuesday, July 12th 2011. The talk will be an overview of how the Aegir project uses Jenkins to continuously test the Aegir code, and how you can use a combination of Git, Drush Make, Aegir and Jenkins to test an installation of your site automatically every time you commit a change to your project.

A while ago I wrote that I had started to use Jenkins for various purposes such as server backups, providing better notification in event of failure, yadda yadda.

Over at the Aegir project I implemented Jenkins to give us a continuous integration platform that kicks into gear either on demand or whenever one of us pushes a commit to the Drupal git repos. It does the following:

Recently Linode announced their IPv6 rollout. My Linode, which (at the time of writing) runs this website, is in Dallas, and once Dallas was IPv6-ready I requested an IPv6 address to be assigned to it.

Aegir is well known for making site upgrades very easy, fast and safe by way of the Migrate task. But some users might be wondering how to make the Aegir 'frontend', which is a Drupal-6 site itself, run on the latest version of Drupal without having to reinstall Aegir entirely.

For instance, if you installed Aegir 1.0 or 1.1, your Aegir system is probably running on Drupal 6.20.

At my part time job, my junior has been fleshing out a Jenkins (formerly known as Hudson) installation.

In the long term, what we have in mind is providing a proper testing suite for the developers and testers in the company to use. But to get to grips with the software and what it's capable of doing, he came up with a great idea: transition our routine cron tasks into Jenkins 'builds'.

Aegir is a pretty powerful tool that allows you to very quickly provision new Drupal sites out of the box and manage them throughout their lifespan through a variety of tasks.

Its ability to understand different install profiles and thus 'distributions' shoots the awesome factor through the roof once you can deploy instances of OpenAtrium, Pressflow, ManagingNews or your own custom distro in just a couple of clicks.